Written by James V. Schall, S.J.

James V. Schall, S.J. was a Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is author and editor of over thirty books, the latest being Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught (St. Augustine's, 2016).

"What is happening in the Muslim world is not so much an outburst of fanaticism as a frantic last-ditch effort to ward off the specter of - well, not of capitalism, not of Communism, not of hedonism - but of science."- Stanley Jaki, "On Whose Side Is History?"[1]

I.Not since the Crusades, perhaps, has an understanding of Islam's self-understanding of itself…

Michael Cook, the Editor of MercatorNet, has kindly invited me to make some comments on a new book of mine, On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018. Several of the chapters in this book originally appeared in MercatorNet. As I mention in the book’s Introduction, I have paid attention to the rises and falls of Islam ever since I read, some…

But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and serene evening of a life spent in peaceful, blameless, enlightened pursuits. Such, we are told, were the last years of Plato, who died in his eighty-first year while still actively engaged in writing. — Cicero, On Old Age [1]IIn Volume III of his Order and History, Eric Voegelin reflected…

The experience of the cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emerging from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos. – Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 2000.[1]

IIn a seminal passage, Eric Voegelin spoke of “the primary experience of the cosmos.” By this phrase, he did…

Philosophy is to remind us of the necessity in things: not just to the necessities to which we have to resign ourselves, but those we can find splendid.– Robert Sokolowski, Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study.[1]

Now classical political philosophy has held that it is not any natural power that is first and properly the concern of the political art, but on…

This is why we are engaged in a drama of which we are not the source, and we sense the importance of responding rightly to the pull of Being. What is at stake far transcends any immanent good. It is nothing less than the loss of our participation in Being. The soul of man is, as Dostoevsky noted, a battlefield…